"After you find out all the things that can go wrong, your life becomes less
about living and more about waiting."
― Chuck Palahniuk, Choke

Thesynergyonline Health Bureau

No disease suffered by a live man can be known, for every living person
has his own peculiarities and always has his own peculiar, personal, novel,
complicated disease, unknown to medicine -- not a disease of the lungs, liver,
skin, heart, nerves, and so on mentioned in medical books, but a disease consisting
of one of the innumerable combinations of the maladies of those organs. This simple
thought could not occur to the doctors (as it cannot occur to a wizard that he is
unable to work his charms) because the business of their lives was to cure, and they
received money for it and had spent the best years of their lives on that business.
But above all that thought was kept out of their minds by the fact that they saw they
were really useful [...] Their usefulness did not depend on making the patient swallow
substances for the most part harmful (the harm was scarcely perceptible because they
were given in small doses) but they were useful, necessary, and indispensable because
they satisfied a mental need of the invalid and those who loved her -- and that is why
there are, and always will be, pseudo-healers, wise women, homoeopaths, and allopaths.
They satisfied that eternal human need for hope of relief, for sympathy, and that something
should be done, which is felt by those who are suffering."
― Leo Tolstoy

"It is hard to talk about a middle ground for something that is a fundamental right."
― Teri Reynolds, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

"Seeing modern health care from the other side, I can say that it is clearly not set up for the patient. It is frequently a poor arrangement for doctors as well, but that does not mitigate how little the system accounts for the patient's best interest. Just when you are at your weakest and least able to make all the phone calls, traverse the maze of insurance, and plead for health-care referrals is that one time when you have to  your life may depend on it."
― Ross I. Donaldson, The Lassa Ward: One Man's Fight Against One of the World's Deadliest Diseases

"Poor health was not just the result of random acts, bad luck, bad behavior or unfortunate genetics. Deliberate public policy decision about housing, education, parks and streets were the key drivers of racial differences in mortality. Crime kept people off the streets and limited their ability to exercise. The lack of grocery stores limited dietary choices. The lack of primary care doctors and specialists in these communities made chronic disease care more difficult. The degradation and loss of hospital services in these communities affected hospital-based outcomes. … The chronic underfunding of critical health services at Cook County Hospital and other safety-net providers contributed to these poor outcomes as well. The deleterious impact of social structures such as urban poverty and racism on health has been called 'structural violence."
― David A. Ansell, County: Life, Death and Politics at Chicago's Public Hospital

"Of the many 'firsts' with which I have been involved at the Texas Heart Institute —including the first successful human heart transplant in the United States and the first total artificial heart transplant in the world—the achievement that may have the greatest impact on health care did not occur in the operating room or in the research laboratory. It happened on a piece of paper... when we created the first-ever packaged pricing plan for cardiovascular surgical procedures."
― Denton Cooley

"The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute that it takes me to compose this sentence, thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are slowly being devoured from within by rasping parasites, thousands of all kinds are dying of starvation, thirst, and disease. It must be so. If there ever is a time of plenty, this very fact will automatically lead to an increase in the population until the natural state of starvation and misery is restored. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference."
― Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

"many scientists have interfered with science in precisely the way courts always worried tissue donors might do. "It's ironic," she told me. "The Moore court's concern was, if you give a person property rights in their tissues, it would slow down research because people might withhold access for money. But the Moore decision backfired—it just handed that commercial value to researchers." According to Andrews and a dissenting California Supreme Court judge, the ruling didn't prevent commercialization; it just took patients out of the equation and emboldened scientists to commodify tissues in increasing numbers. Andrews and many others have argued that this makes scientists less likely to share samples and results, which slows research; they also worry that it interferes with health-care delivery."
― Rebecca Skloot

"Let's be clear. The debate over health care in this country is not a debate about medical treatment or the best way to prevent disease. It is a debate about economics and class politics. Either we maintain a profit-driven health care system whose main function is to enrich certain individuals and institutions, or we develop a nonprofit, cost-effective system that provides quality health care for all people as a right of citizenship."
― Bernie Sanders, Outsider in the White House

"That's one of the reasons why, say, Canada, a very similar country, has a health care system and we don't. In Canada, the unions struggled for health care for the country. In the United States, they struggled for health care for themselves. So if you're an autoworker here in the United States, you had a pretty god health care and pension system. Union workers won health care for themselves in a compact with the corporations. They thought it was a deal. What they couldn't see was that it's a suicide pact. If the corporation decides the compact is over, then it's over. Meanwhile, the rest of the country didn't get health care. So now the United States has a completely dysfunctional health care system, while Canada has one that more or less works. That's a relation of different cultural values and institutional structures in two very similar countries. So yes, the working class did continue to develop and grow here, but with class collaboration, that is, in a compact with the corporations."
― Noam Chomsky, Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to U.S. Empire

"One quarter of Medicare beneficiaries have five or more chronic conditions, sees an average of 13 physicians each year, and fills 50 prescriptions per year."
― Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator's Prescription: A Disruptive Solution for Health Care